Exchange 2000 Server on Site Book/Cd Package [Illustrated] [Paperback]

I have worked with Exchange in its previous releases for over four years in the capacity of support, consulting, and presales. When I was first learning that product, I felt that there really weren't any good books written on Exchange. I found that to be true with Exchange 2000 as well - most of the books are point-and-click books. However, this book by Goran Husman is very different.

Why is it that I like this book? This book focuses on the architecture and processes of Exchange 2000. I'm a firm believer that whatever product you decide to implement, understanding what happens under the hood will help you make the best decisions on how to implement, and if something goes wrong, how to troubleshoot. An excellent example is how the author explained the internal mail flow, Advanced Queuing engine, and Event Sinks.

This book is really written for a reader with a moderate understanding of previous versions of Exchange. The author very effectively uses comparisons between, for example, the old Site topology with the new Administrative Groups and Routing Groups. However, I think it may be more difficult for someone without knowledge previous versions of Exchange to appreciate this method.

Here and there, the author also includes many of the real-world learned experiences. This is where I believe you can tell one author who writes books from another who has been in the field. For example, the author mentioned that in the middle of the life of Exchange 5.5, the storage engine rereads the database up to 16 times before marking a bad database page (the kiss-of-death 1018 error). I know this may be a minute detail, but for those of us who have been in the front lines, it's great to know that the author you're reading is also from the trenches.

The author also brings a lot of history into this book that may not be Exchange-exclusive. There's a whole section on RFC's and which ones Exchange uses. Also, there's a long discussion on DNS in the mail space. For most of us who've worked with messaging for awhile, this can be a nice refresher, but do realize that maybe you may think this is fluff.

On the downside, I was hoping for more information about coexistence and migration. The author mentioned a few methods that are basically Microsoft-recommended methods. The Active Directory Connector section was, in my opinion, too much "how-to" and lacking the "why," compared to the other parts of this book. As most organizations already have one form of messaging platform or another, and given that most migrations to Exchange 2000 will be from previous versions, I'd expected some scenario examples here.

Also, the author does not spend any time writing about database recovery in depth. There's no mention of eseutil besides some header dumps and no mention of isinteg at all. One of the nice things, theoretically, about Exchange 2000 now is that you can have multiple mail stores, allowing for data partitioning and reduced downtime. However, stores in the same Storage Groups all share the same logs, which can be interesting if you have to restore an older-than-last full backup and be able to roll the logs forward or perform an eseutil /p without affecting the other stores in the Storage Group. I believe all of this deserves a full chapter.

Altogether, I find this book to be extremely easy and logical to read. The content is really medium level but packed with sound advice from the field. If you're like me where you've had experience with the previous releases of Exchange and would like to learn the new features and architecture of Exchange 2000, this book is a great start for you.

Concerning the bad index someone wrote about, I know that was a mistake by Coriolis (the publishers) but all the books with a non matching index should be destroyed, if you got a book with a bad index from Amazon just return the book and get a new one.